Devil's Harbor (15 page)

She stiffened. “What's this got to do with anything?”

“Why didn't you go farther out? A week, that's hardly worth the effort, seems to me. Why didn't you head out farther west?”

“You seen the size of my boat? I'm lucky if I make it past Cabo. I can't compete with those big boats go out all the way to Japan. I don't have a helicopter for spotting schools. And anyway, no one wants radioactive fish. You got a point?”

“I called Fish and Wildlife,” he said. “I saw your catch log.”

She gave him a hard look.

“You haven't caught anything this season. Fish and Wildlife says you're not even close to your quota. So I figure three things could be happening here. Either you're the unluckiest fishing boat in the Pacific, or you're not declaring your catch, or you're not fishing at all.” He held her gaze. The green-and-gold shimmer had sharpened. “You don't declare your catch, you could lose your license,” he said.

“My generator gave out. I had to throw out the catch. I wasn't going to declare a catch I couldn't sell.”

The lie was so blatant, Finn could only admire her for telling it with a straight face.

“My dad worked a seiner back when I was growing up in the nineties,” he said. “Small boat, like yours. He used to go after the tuna every spring. Then the tuna stopped coming inshore, and only the big boats could go out far enough to get them. The industry collapsed. All those men out of work, boats getting repossessed. You wouldn't be the first fishing boat to turn to trafficking. What did you do? Stop at some quiet fishing village in Baja, take on a few packages?”

She pulled her hands out of her pockets and lit a cigarette, the flame guttering in time with the tremor she was trying to hide. She took a deep drag and then, with the cigarette clasped between her index and middle fingers, waved toward the fishing fleet. “You see all these boats here?” she said. “All these guys, they go out there, risk their lives to catch fish. This is the most dangerous business in the world. There are lots of accidents. Men die all the time.”

An image of his father's fake leg came to Finn's mind. “If you've got a point, I missed it,” he said.

“What I'm telling you, Finn, is that this is a dangerous business, and we look after our own. We don't talk to outsiders. Especially not those who come around here disrespecting us, making allegations.”

She was talking tough, but her tone didn't match her words. She sounded scared.

“Who's your co-owner?”

She blinked. “What?”

“Muir Holdings? Who is that? Who are you protecting?”

She dragged on her cigarette, fixed her eyes on his. “Go home to your wife, Finn. You have no idea what you're dealing with.”

“What happened to Espendoza?”

“I haven't seen him—”

“Bullshit. I think you know exactly what happened to him. In fact, I think he came off this boat.”

She started up the gangway. He hustled behind her, the metal clanging under his feet.

“How did you know I'm married?”

She turned and glanced at his left hand. Finn didn't wear a ring.

“Get off my boat,” she said.

“Not before you tell me what happened to Diego.”

Someone stepped onto the gangway behind him. He turned and saw the man in yellow bibs. He had two companions behind him, both the size of NFL nose tackles.

“Is there a problem here?” said the refrigerator.

Finn turned back to Linda. “I
know
Diego spoke to you, Linda. I don't give a damn what you do with your boat. All I want is whoever killed Diego.”

“This guy bothering you, Captain?” said the man in bibs.

“Yes,” she said.

Finn turned to the man. “This is official business. I'm a marine interdiction agent with Customs and Border Protection. There's no trouble here.”

From their dead-eyed looks, Finn got the impression that the trio did not give much weight to the federal government or its agents.

“Captain says get off her boat,” said the man.

“We're just having a conversation.”

“Conversation's over.”

Finn looked at the three men and wondered if he was about to get the crap kicked out of him again.

They looked like they were wondering the same thing.

He threw up his hands. “Okay, okay, I'm going,” he said, glancing back.

Linda Blake had disappeared into the wheelhouse. She had more flint to her than he had thought. She wasn't going to give up Diego's killer without some arm-twisting, and he couldn't twist her arm with her sitting safely in the pocket. She had quite the offensive line around her, and, truth be told, Finn was relieved to get off the gangway before it collapsed under their combined weight.

*   *   *

He'd been waiting in his truck for two hours by the time Linda came off the
Belle
and appeared in the parking lot. He shrank down in his seat and watched her get into a white Tahoe. She pulled out of the lot and turned left. Finn gave her ten seconds, then pulled out behind her.

The sun was up now and the air was getting warmer. The roads were filled with people on their way to work. He followed the Tahoe down West Twenty-second, pulling up a couple of cars behind her at each of the lights. She turned left on South Gaffey, then right onto Twenty-fifth. A couple of miles down the road, Twenty-fifth Street turned into Palos Verdes Drive. Linda stuck to the speed limit. The farther they went into Palos Verdes, the more the neighborhood improved, with eucalypti standing guard over mowed front lawns, trimmed hedges veiling wide, pricey-looking houses with double-front garages, the street spotless, not a pothole in sight. The white Tahoe turned off on a local road. Finn knew what kind of money fishermen took home, and this wasn't the kind of neighborhood in which they lived.

Linda pulled into the driveway of a single-story, modern-looking, cement-and-wood house. Finn drifted past her. Through his tinted windows, he saw the front door of the house open and Lucy appear next to a woman who looked enough like Linda for Finn to figure she was the sister.

He got to the end of the street, turned around, and pulled up in the shade of some trees. He checked his watch. It was 9:45
A.M
. Too early for a drink.

He had one anyway.

That Linda had led him to her sister's house disappointed him. He'd hoped, unreasonably, that she would lead him straight to Diego's killer. But all she'd done was go home. He searched around for a piece of paper on which to write down the address. All he could find was the counselor's card that he'd thrown on the floor.

He was about to leave when he saw Linda, Lucy, and the sister reappear from the house. The sister had on a nurse's uniform. She held open the Tahoe's back door while Lucy climbed in, then closed the door and got in the front passenger side, next to Linda at the wheel. For the hell of it, Finn pulled out from the shade and followed them. Linda navigated her way through the back streets of Palos Verdes, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach. She turned right onto Rosecrans, and Finn almost overshot the ramp when she veered onto the 405 northbound. He had to cut off a Suburban, whose driver honked exuberantly. He kept his eyes fixed on the Tahoe: if Linda had made him, she hadn't reacted.

Half an hour later, she took the Santa Monica exit and drove west to a large hospital. The white Tahoe went through a boom gate into the parking lot and headed down a row of parking spaces. Finn followed, took the next row, and pulled into an empty space. He watched Linda and her sister get out of the car and open the back door for Lucy, who was playing with a length of rope. The three of them walked into the hospital.

Linda had talked about taking her daughter to a doctor's appointment, but he'd imagined an office visit, not a hospital. His heart went out to her. He thought the kid must be sicker than he'd realized. Maybe his gut had been wrong about Linda. Maybe she had acted the way she had because she was stressed about her sick daughter.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Forty minutes later, Finn got out of his truck and walked up the set of stone steps, through the tinted-glass door, and into the air-conditioned, tube-lit foyer of the L.A. County Coroner's office.

He walked to a counter next to a set of double-swing doors marked
CORONER STAFF ONLY
and asked the receptionist, a light-skinned black woman with the elongated eyelashes and straightened hair of a pop star, to page Eugene Geisinger, the medical examiner. While he waited, he wandered over to the gift shop. The sign over the door read
SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET,
the font arranged out of little bones. In the shopwindow he saw beach towels, T-shirts, tote bags, and baseball caps printed with body outlines, skeletons, and L.A. County Coroner emblems. The boxer shorts were branded
UNDERTAKERS.

A man in a blue lab coat came through the double-swing doors. He was a slim six feet and had slicked-back black hair. Intelligent, dark eyes peered out from beneath dense eyebrows.

“Jesus, what happened to your fucking face?” said the medical examiner, his hand extended.

Finn shook his hand and shrugged off the question. “What does it say about this city, has a morgue with a gift shop?” he said, nodding toward the shopwindow.

“This right here is a license to print money,” said Geisinger. “People come down, make a positive ID of a husband or boyfriend, then head home with a fucking souvenir. Now, what
you
need is one of these beach towels with the body-outline print, on account of all the floaters you bring in.”

Finn chuckled joylessly. “I heard you got Diego here,” he said.

Geisinger didn't answer right away, so Finn waited out the silence by looking back at the display case. In the glass, he saw the reflection of Geisinger's jaw muscles twitching. Geisinger's face was ravaged looking, though from what, Finn didn't know. As far as he knew, the M.E. didn't smoke or drink, or at least didn't drink the way Finn did. For all his cussing, Geisinger was a classy guy. He listened to classical music while he worked.

“It broke my heart when I saw him,” Geisinger said after a minute. “He was a good man. It's a fucked-up thing. Please give my deepest condolences to Mona.”

Finn nodded. Then he said, “What about my floater?”

Geisinger brightened. “Oh man, your floater—he's a big celebrity around here. There are med students coming down from Keck just to take a look at that piece of shark snack, morbid fuckers. His legs, what's left of them, look like hamburgers. Put me off my lunch, which is saying something. But that's not the important thing. Someone who knew what he was doing cut an incision about seven inches right here”—Geisinger tapped his side, just below his ribs—“removed one of his fucking kidneys, then sewed him up. Only, they were less careful when they sewed him up. The sutures got infected. There's traces of puss.”

Finn stared at their reflection in the glass. “Why would anyone do that?” he said.

Geisinger shrugged. “It's fucked up. You heard about the kid over in China, sold his for an iPad?”

“Jesus.”

Geisinger sighed. “We also found water in his lungs.”

“Back up a second. You're saying that they killed him first, then took the kidney? They stole it?”

“I doubt it. Why stitch up a fucking dead man? No, I think he had the operation, then died, but I can't say whether he died from post-op complications or from something else. We found traces of propofol in his blood.”

Finn's incomprehension must have been evident, because Geisinger added, “That's a serious anesthetic used in surgery. It's only available in hospitals. Anesthesiologists call it ‘milk of amnesia.'”

“Is that what killed him? Propofol?”

Geisinger shook his head. “It can kill you in high doses—Michael Jackson was pumped full of it—but your guy lost so much blood, there's no way of knowing if he had a lethal dose or not. All I can say for sure is that he was definitely dead when the fucking shark got his legs.”

Finn scratched his bruised face. “So what's your best guess?” he said.

Geisinger shook his head emphatically. “Oh no, I'm not playing that game. Could've been the propofol, could've been all the fucking alcohol we found in his gut. Or maybe he just drowned. You guys brought us a real winner this time. I'm putting the cause of death as undetermined.” Geisinger paused. “Though, of course, most guys in his line of work don't die naturally.”

Finn thought for a moment. “What do you mean, ‘his line of work'?”

Geisinger pointed at the side of his own neck. “You see the crucifix he had tattooed here?”

Finn shook his head.

“Caballeros de Cristo—the Knights of Christ—down in Sinaloa. You know the ones: shoot you to pieces, then give you a Christian burial?”

Finn couldn't believe it. If Espendoza was a Caballero, then it linked him with Perez. “But he was just a kid. Plus, he was from East L.A. An American citizen. The Caballeros are a Mexican outfit.”

Geisinger shrugged. “Maybe they're franchising. Maybe it's NAFTA. Maybe they don't recognize the border. Hey, I'm just the medical examiner, what the fuck do I know? What I'm telling you is anyone who gets that tattoo on his neck and isn't a fucking Caballero and they find out, they're going to separate his neck from his head, right? So either Espendoza was a Knight of Christ or else he was so stupid he died of it.”

Finn absorbed this, then asked, “Do you know when he died, or how long he'd been in the water?”

“You pulled him out Wednesday morning, the twenty-first. I would say he'd been in the water four or five days by then, maybe even longer. He had a lot of gas in him, more than most of them, probably because of the wound. As for whether he was already dead when he went in…” Here, Geisinger shrugged.